That Moment of Indeterminate Time In Which Everything Happens

I wanted Sophie to have some sort of invocation for these “frozen moment” bullet-time sequences. So I dredged into Google trying to find out if anyone had ever come up with a name for that feeling you get when shit is really hitting the fan and time seems to slow to a crawl. It’s a common enough experience. I ended up discovering the Greek word kairos which has a number of definitions, such as “The Supreme Moment” (woo-woo!) or “a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens.”

Works for me. And it looks good in rune-type lettering.

Sure happened to me once, in my teenage years. I was speeding the family sedan past a lumbering truck on a divided highway, when a car waiting to cross the highway decided to pull out, stop at the concrete divider, and wait for the traffic coming the other way to clear. Because I was accelerating faster than the truck, I had been hidden from the other driver and he had assumed my lane was clear. So I’m doing sixty and suddenly there’s another car pulling right out in front of me. Concrete divider to my left and a truck to my right. I had nowhere to go. Mashed the brake but there wasn’t even enough room. I was going to die.

It seemed to take forever.

I remember being very calm. Very reflective; almost philosophical. Somewhere off in the distance I was vaguely aware of tires screeching and the car ahead of me, slowing to a stop in my lane at right angles, the driver not even looking at me, but looking at the traffic coming the other way. And I was thinking: Shit. I’m going to die. Man, what a bummer. I had plans. I wanted to go places. To do things. To bone my best friend’s sister. Important stuff.

And then there was a hell of a lot of noise and glass flying everywhere and pain in both my wrists from locking up on the steering wheel (which did not stop me one iota.) You have to understand that in my day, seat belts were optional. Most people didn’t bother with them. But as it happened, they’d recently showed that ghastly Signal 30 safety film in my school; the one showing mutilated corpses being pulled out of cars because they hadn’t been wearing seat belts. So that morning, I’d decided to actually buckle in. And because of that, I lived.

The other car (a big Lincoln) had been seriously crushed, but in the rear compartment, which was empty. So nobody died or was even seriously hurt, but both cars were totalled. My first reaction after all the noise had subsided was to run away. Just run and run and run until it wouldn’t have happened and everything would be okay again.

What I wouldn’t give for a Hulu-style “10-second rewind” button on life.

I was shaking so hard from the adrenaline rush that all I could do was pry myself out of the wreckage and go sit on the curb. Various emergency people showed up and one of them must have called my father, because before I knew it, he was there, just standing in front of me with his hands in his pockets, looking at the ruined cars and then down at me.

“Well,” he said. “I guess it’s about time you learned how to deal with insurance companies.”

To this day, I still think that was a cool, fatherly line. I liked it so much I later on used it myself. Twice. Once with each son, when they totalled cars. And we all of us did learn how to deal with insurance companies.

But yeah, that Kairos moment. Time slowing to a crawl. Sure I was going to die.

I don’t recall there being any indication or mention of her having magical abilities when she was alive – are you thinking of any specific reference, or just speculating? I just assumed that being a spirit entailed some inherent power.

You’re probably just kidding, but of course perceived time does not actually change the kinetic energy. That’s why Sophie is struggling. Keeping the boy and Countdown inside the Kairos field is taking a hell of a lot of power, and that bullet’s still coming.

I remember an episode of Batman: The Animated Series that played with this concept. The Clock King froze the Batmobile in the middle of the road. You could see cars speeding around it, and Batman says that if any car hit the Batmobile, even the it appears immobile, would be striking it as if it were moving at high speed!

Every time I see that effect in films I sort of wonder how far it extends. Mostly I think it’s presented as a bubble of selective time, outside of which time is progressing at normal speed. Here, Sophie can include selective elements such as herself, Max, and the boy, but not Hayes and the bullet.

I’ve had a few of those Kairos moments, most recently when I overextended rock climbing. I’m not sure what was worse, the frozen moment when you know it’s all downhill and there’s nothing you can do, or the five weeks in a cast in the middle of summer.

Oh, and Bob? Maybe you didn’t get to bone a friend’s sister, but you have a beautiful blonde and two good kids, so you still came out ahead.

There was a villain in “The Batman” who could rewind time just a short amount, just enough to try something as many times as he wanted to. That was his only superpower, yet he was basically the most overpowered villain in cartoon history. I won’t spoil the ending but it’s pretty damn cool.

Wow, you only did that once? in my first two years of driving I had somewhere near 70 accidents ranging from harmless running off the road to one that gave me amnesia and made it to CNN that day. After the first few, every accident and life threatening event( including being the first officer on the scene to a riot and getting stuck in the middle with an overly gung ho partner) took on that slow motion quality you described. At least it rules out panic!

I used to do the slow time thing a lot. The last time things got silly with it though as I got bored waiting on the fist aimed at my face that was almost stopped. I haven’t done the slow motion thing since, I think I broke something. Over exerted the gland, not damage from the punch.

Well, there was more than one insurance company, and I eventually wound up with one that I have stayed with for almost two decades now. You know the one, has a funny lady spokesperson on their tongue in cheek TV adds.

Omega13.
It rewound the entire universe’s time back for 13 seconds at the potential risk of destroying the ENTIRE UNIVERSE, and no one really knew what was gonna happen when it was activated.
When I saw the movie in the theater and the captain activated it to save the crew and the little squid people from certain death, I found myself wondering what kind of self-centered @$$%$!# rolls the dice with those odds even to save people you care about…

That’s actually not true. The device’s purpose was intentionally left undefined as a part of the last episode’s cliffhanger. Since the show was cancelled, it remained undefined. This left the geeks to speculate what it did. Some thought it destroyed the universe in 13 seconds while others thought it did a 13 second jump-back.

Of course who knows what the Thermians thought when they built the thing…nobody bothered to ask them. 🙂

is there a word for the opposite? in situations like that, I find the world SPEEDS UP! but that I also have some amazing fast reaction times. Actually… becasue it happens so fast that I usually have no clue what JUST happened… i wonder… what if time slowed down and someone else took control…